Top Reasons for Homeschooling

What are the top reasons for homeschooling? Teaching your children yourself, at home, was widely despised just three decades ago, but is now becoming part of mainstream American culture. It is almost becoming fashionable to homeschool nowadays. And homeschoolers are no longer considered the lepers of society.

Back in the 80s and 90s, the main reason for homeschooling was religion. Parents felt that the secular education given in public schools ran counter to their own religious beliefs.

In the 21st century, many other parents are homeschooling their kids for various reasons. But homeschooling is not a recent phenomenon. Homo Sapiens have been homeschooling their kids for as long as they have been around, and that has been for a staggering 195,000 years!

Of course, our distant ancestors didn’t read Shakespeare’s sonnets or peer through microscopes with their kids. Theirs was an informal education. You can imagine the children sitting wide-eyed around a campfire as the tribal elders recounted the dangers of swimming in crocodile-infested waters or wandering out of the village on a moonless night.

But if you get the impression that homeschooling can never be on par with public-school education, you might be amazed to learn that some of America’s distinguished presidents have been homeschooled. Whatever their reasons for homeschooling, the parents of George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have been immensely proud of their children’s colossal accomplishments.

Homeschoolers are no pushovers when it comes to intellectual achievement either. Research has shown time and again that homeschoolers consistently score higher on standardized tests than their peers educated in public schools. And homeschoolers are regularly gaining admission to the top universities of the world. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge and Oxford (to name a few) have no qualms about opening the doors to their hallowed halls to armies of homeschoolers.

Some of the brightest minds on earth such as Thomas Edison and Mark Twain have also been happily homeschooled.

In short, one of the reasons for homeschooling is that your child can reach the dizzying heights of Mount Achievement.

But how do homeschoolers achieve such spectacular success? It is quite simple, really. Imagine a typical public school classroom. The harried teacher has to impart knowledge to the best of her ability to a class of between 20 to 40 kids with myriad personalities, backgrounds, hopes, emotions and IQs.

Only a person who has ever taught such a diverse group before will know how frustratingly difficult it is to make every one of them succeed. The chances of making every child succeed and go to college are almost infinitesimal. If you don’t believe me, just look at the national statistics on failures and school dropouts in America. It is a dismal situation.

I am not blaming the teachers though. It is certainly not their fault. They are not miracle workers and should never be made into scapegoats for this appalling situation.

So what do public schools lack that homeschools have in abundance? The answer is the precious commodity Time.

While public school teachers have no time to attend to the needs of each and every child in their class no matter how desperately they may want to, homeschooling parents have all the time in the world to answer all the questions of their children and make sure they fully understand the topic before moving on to the next. Unlimited individual attention is the trump card that homeschoolers wield with devastating force.